[This entry may be corrected in minor ways in the near future. Some edits were done on 10/17/12 and 10/18/12; an important plot note is enclosed between asterisks. Edits 2/23/14. Edits 3/14/14. Edits 3/17/14. Edits 3/18/14. Edit 4/1/14. Edit 5/28/14.]
“[Intellectuals are] like the Mafia—they only kill their own.”
—my favorite line from this film, spoken by Woody Allen’s character
Subsections below:
Allen’s late-1960s start in movies
The comic and serious sides of Allen start to delineate themselves
The important factor of his female costars
A personal “crossing paths”—nothing much
Stardust Memories as a sort of crossroads work
His dealing with critical and audience reactions to his turn to the serious
This film came at a time when European-style philosophy still seemed in our infrastructure
The visual and social-satire style
Final notes on social pretensions, one-liners, etc.
Woody Allen is such a familiar and unique “brand,” and his career in movies is so long, that we both seem to know him (his work) well (whether we like him or not) and also forget how fresh and amusing his work (particularly the old stuff) can be.
If cinephiles were to mention a classic Allen movie that represented the best of what he had to offer to the history of cinema, it might be Annie Hall (1977) and, if throwing in a few other older works, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and arguably Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Annie Hall seems so much an established template for a type of comedy—a neurotic, intellectual male has the capacity for love opened up in his relationship with a quirky, lively woman—that its pattern seems to turn up in all sorts of places: for instance, in Zach Braff’s Garden State (2004), on which it had an obvious influence. Even in a scene or two in Analyze This (1999), starring Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro, you can see in Billy’s character’s talking with his fiancee Laura (played by Lisa Kudrow) some of the quality of a nervous Woody Allen type talking in a rather intellectual entreaty (or attempt at romantic overture) to his quirky-yet-lovely girlfriend. The Annie Hall pattern even seems to show up, ironically, in what is probably Allen’s worst late movie (or worst of any of his movies), Anything Else (2003), which stars Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci in an underbaked story that seems like warmed-over Annie Hall at best.
Allen’s style of comedy and scripts is so familiar that even Evan Rachel Wood, who co-starred in Whatever Works (2009), referred to that movie in respectful-enough off-set talk as a classic Woody script—it actually had been written in the 1970s, apparently. Wood’s birth was still seven years in the future when Stardust Memories (1980) came out, this film marking the end of a series of movies that marked Allen’s self-analysis phase, as the Videohound review compendium suggests.
Allen’s late-1960s start in movies
Throughout Allen’s movies, the scripts often work—even if they contain obvious flaws—because of one-liner comedy that sometimes takes you immediately and makes you laugh—the humor can be a little uproarious, maybe too strong for a sensitive story, yet still is infectious. When he started in movies in the 1960s, he had been a standup comic. (Others have documented and analyzed his life, and I am not as boned up on it as I should be, so I will just be sketchy here.) One of the first films in which he wrote good comedy was What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), which is actually a previously released, meant-to-be-taken-seriously Japanese-language James Bond–type movie to which, as an “alternative” version, Woody and others added humorous English-language overdubs. Making up their own dialogue that need not have matched the moving Japanese lips, they fashioned a parody about some adventure involving the obtaining the recipe for a special egg salad recipe (it is so good it’ll “make you plotz”). Scenes are reordered from the original, and Allen had help from cohorts including comedienne (and, later, an actress in his early movies) Louise Lasser; none appear on screen—you just see the Japanese footage while hearing Allen’s overdubs.
The film was released, I believe, by Roger Corman’s famed low-budget company, and I think the intent was never to make anything more than cheesy drive-in fodder, because the studio very crudely intercut scenes of the rock group the Lovin' Spoonful playing in a couple places. But as homemade as the effort may sound—kids today could make the same sort of thing on a laptop—it is actually quite funny. The humor is Mad magazine style, but it still works today.
After he starred in a later-1960s movie in which he found the production experience dreadful, he decided (as seems to have been the prevailing story) that he would only appear in films that he himself directed. He got his start with Take the Money and Run (1969), which is still today a template for a mock-documentary kind of movie, about a loser who embarks on a life of crime (and many fumbles), narrated in dead-serious tone by Jackson Beck. Allen himself would use the generally same sort of style for his Zelig (1983), which came after he had made several serious, critically lauded movies.
The comic and serious sides of Allen start to delineate themselves
He sets out a movie-comedy style
The two strains in Allen’s writing of the belly-laugh comical and the drily serious have become, since the late 1970s, key aspects to his work, though the serious side has given some viewers pause for a long time. First, he made a string of comical movies that featured his style of laugh-a-minute, short-scened action—almost a sort of vaudeville, standup comedian “revue” that recalls the Marx Brothers, who are an influence on him he has acknowledged: Bananas (1971); Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (1972); Sleeper (1973), which was his first film to include co-star Diane Keaton, who had earlier broken into big-name movies in The Godfather (1972) and its sequel; and the Russian-literature parody Love and Death (1975), which also costarred Keaton. [Update 2/23/14: I reviewed Sleeper and Love and Death in winter 2014; look here.] In the 1970s, he did not completely forgo acting in movies he didn’t direct; he appeared in Play It Again, Sam (1972), for which he wrote the screenplay, and the interesting The Front (1976; see my April 13 blog entry).
Another feature of his work—which it seems no other comedian or filmmaker has been able to pull off, at least as long as Allen has—is to appear the same way (visually as a typed persona) in all his films. No beauty, he appears unadorned, with somewhat frumpy hair (looking better in later years, and with a bald spot appearing as the years have gone by), thick-framed horn-rimmed glasses, and often giving an air of a nebbish who might seem a total loser if it wasn’t for the intelligent (if often philosophical, culturally aware, and depressive) comments that could issue from him.
This image, I suppose, worked for his standup work; then when he started making comic movies, he used it in them, of course even when his character wasn’t explicitly himself (or meant to be like his standup persona). Thus, his early comic movies seemed, in a way, to be a standup comedian (Allen “stretching his range” as an actor but obviously always “that nebbish again”) starring in movies about something he ordinarily wouldn’t have been involved in—shenanigans in a banana republic, bizarre stuff happening in a future world, etc. It was a sort of subtly ironic twist on the old movie-star technique; instead of Cary Grant doing a turn in all sorts of stories while you were always impressed with it being Grant playing the part, you had Allen in his comedies, so “stubbornly” his own persona that, even disguised as a grey-colored-and-tuxedoed robot, he wore those characteristic horn-rimmed glasses.
He embarks on more serious themes
Then when his trademark persona started to appear in movies with more serious, or at least adult (with comedy) themes, we were still seeing a Woody Allen movie. But now the new creative level to which he rose was not “the same nebbish in all those comedies,” but the semi-nebbish we’ve grown to love embracing a more serious mode of writing. No longer was he doing so obviously a joke-a-minute revue of sorts; now he was writing films as someone with serious concerns aspiring to say something about love, life, man’s fate—actually, surprisingly ambitious themes.
Whether his appreciation of the death-tinged blacklisting story of The Front made him think with more seriousness about his career or not, Annie Hall, his next film, marked a major turning point in his career by many people’s standards. (While some might say Love and Death [1975] heralded his turn toward the serious, I think it was too oddly a parody of sorts to really be this.) Though Annie Hall was originally part of a much longer script that included, of all things, a murder mystery (the lopped-off part later became Manhattan Murder Mystery [1993] [update 4/1/14: this seems, basically, to have been the case, per Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf: 2007), pp. 29, 94]), it featured the by-now iconic themes of the neurotic, grappling-with-deadly-serious-issues male somehow having his heart turned on by a quirky female. The film won an Oscar for Best Picture (as well as an Oscar to him for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, the latter shared with Marshall Brickman, and an Oscar to Diane Keaton for Best Actress in a Leading Role); this is Allen’s only film to win a Best Picture Oscar. Though it never made a lot of money (at least when first out), it is so famous and satisfying a film that, if any film-lover were to want to watch one semi-serious Allen film to see what he could do best (or at least as a first best effort) in this vein, this would be it.
Allen’s next film was Interiors (1978), which was entirely serious, and did not star him. Diane Keaton and other noted stars were in it, but it—seen at the time as a clear imitation of another hero of Allen’s, Ingmar Bergman—was so off-puttingly serious that it was regarded at the time as a strange, experimental deviation in his career (I can remember something of this critical view from what I heard at the time). I did not see it until pretty recently, say 2009, and I would say today, after having become familiar with much of Allen’s serious work (even when some of this “genre” of his seems too tendentiously dry/self-serious), that Interiors is both well-crafted in its own right and fully in line with his more serious themes—in fact, it constitutes a surprising appearance of such themes as early in his movie career as it was. It’s worth a look for Allen fans. [Update 3/14/14: See my new review on this film, dated 3/14/14, on my other blog.]
Allen returned to the more comic—and yet Annie Hall–style romantic angling—with Manhattan (1979), which I first saw when it was in theaters, and I certainly remember the positive tone of critical appreciation of it. Allen was now in the ranks of major filmmakers (think of Coppola, Kubrick, Scorsese) who, as a critic very recently said (sorry; unable to tell you who), had their next works anticipated almost as if the filmmakers were like oracles. [See my review of Manhattan here.] Allen’s high-water mark as a filmmaker appears to have comprised the period from about Annie Hall (1977) through Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), a decade being an appreciable length of time for the best work of any artist.
In fact, if Allen had stopped making films after Hannah and Her Sisters, or even Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), a very interesting outing that includes serious themes (one of which, involving murder, would reappear in the rightly acclaimed late film Match Point [2005]), then he would be remembered as a major American filmmaker with numerous successes, a distinctive voice, and humor that still scores with us today. His corpus would be more substantial and influential than even such notable 1970s filmmakers as Hal Ashby, William Friedkin, and Michael Cimino, though the careers of some of those were shortened by fate at least as much as by creative ability.
In fact, the variety of Allen’s approaches—and the variation in how successful his films would be—even appeared in his “greatest” period of 1977-86: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) was, along with all else, a period piece and (I think) something of a misfire with critics (I haven’t seen it, though; maybe I’d speak more highly of it if I had seen it [update 3/17/14: I have seen it, and it isn't bad; review to come]); Zelig (which I first saw in the theater, and liked) was a sort of return to older-style humor; Broadway Danny Rose (1984) was not-tops (but is worth a look); and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) was interesting but also a departure from the more typical dramas of Annie Hall, Manhattan, and the later Hannah and Her Sisters. I’ll talk more about his later (post-1986) career further on.
The important factor of his female costars
Another feature of his films has been the apparently stabilizing and guiding influence of a female acting collaborator. People well boned-up on his personal life would have more to say on this than I do [update 3/17/14: see, in my review of Manhattan, the first End note]; I am speaking mainly from knowledge of his films. (And let’s leave aside any assessments of Allen the artist some might make based on the controversial Soon-Yi Previn/Dylan Farrow situation of the early 1990s; the Wikipedia article on Mia Farrow has some information on this.)
Among younger viewers today, it might be tempting to sum up Allen as something of a dinosaur whose comedy, when seen as more hokey, is like that of a Bob Hope type (in Hope’s older USO-show days): hackneyed, be-dump-bump standup routine, a beautiful woman or two (or more) brought along for eye-candy on the stage, maybe some old-time music (jazz or whatever; as says the old-fart esthetic, not the “crap” that today’s young are big on). You know, stuff that sounds like it would appeal to someone who remembers De Sotos and when Joe DiMaggio was still playing. But cereally, folks, Allen is interesting for something that, today, people might feel was a bit “hinky” or “icky”: the phases in which his films had a sort of character, or higher quality, were when his costar was a female who did some of her best or most-remembered work with him—the two presumably were mutual catalysts, to some extent, for doing creative work. (Keaton’s role, inadvertent or not, as a muse for Allen is noted in the Wikipedia article on her.)
Thus Allen first flourished, heading toward more serious work, when associated with Diane Keaton—from Sleeper (1973) through Manhattan (1979). Then he apparently was no longer consorting with her (professionally); there was the unusual “interregnum” work of Stardust Memories; and next thing you know, his leading lady started being Mia Farrow, she of the creative partnership with Roman Polanski for Rosemary’s Baby (1968; she also starred in The Great Gatsby [1974] when apparently still seen by the likes of casting agents as a potential major female star). By 1982, presumably, Farrow would seem to have contented herself with being “in the Woody Allen, relatively low-profile genre,” no longer trying to be the sort of actress that, say, Faye Dunaway was for about a decade (1967-76), or that later actresses (Meryl Streep, Debra Winger, etc.) would be—known more for their accomplishments as individuals than as being part of an informal movie-making “troupe,” which you could say Allen’s circle of collaborators became by the 1980s, no disrespect intended. Farrow stayed with Allen for about a decade—until (I need to check the facts here better; it’s not crucial) 1992, and then the matter involving Soon-Yi Previn and other family members arose, and she was done with him.
In a way, you could say that once Farrow was no longer working with him—it was almost as if as a sort of brief career-rescue mission for Allen that Diane Keaton reunited with him for Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)—never again would Allen work with a female actor so steadily. And whether due to this or not, generally his work seemed to settle into a sort of peculiar, routinely productive banality, with almost a movie coming out every year, yet very little that critics would hail the way they did much of his 1977-86 work. In fact, when something did work well—like Match Point, which was a straight thriller, with a deadly-serious theme (and filmed in Britain, though its social depictions did not really reflect the relevant aspects of British society, as critics there have apparently said)—it was something of an anomaly. Even his Oscar nominations, like that for Best Original Screenplay for his recent Midnight in Paris (2011), still usually come up for screenwriting, and they are not so much done for sentimental reasons “for an old warhorse” as because he’s one of the few regularly working writers doing original screenplays who can still turn out intelligent work not meant to play to an immature audience. In fact, his Wikipedia bio says he has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay 15 times, the most for any screenwriter in history. He has also been nominated as Best Director seven times.
He is remarkable for the longevity of his career, even if nowadays it seems he’s sometimes caught sleeping on set when his films are being made, but no one would say the best part of his career has been within the past 20 or 25 years. And this could be due, it’s not hard to see, to one or both of two things: his getting older (and running out of creative juices), and (more arguably) his not having a female costar so consistently by his side as he had with Keaton and Farrow—someone for whom he could write parts and who, it would seem, could otherwise inspire him as a sort of peer.
Interestingly, a lot of the notable females who have appeared in his more recent films have been up-and-comers placed there by the minor miracles of casting agents, such as Mira Sorvino in his Mighty Aphrodite (1995; she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role here), or Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever Works—and those actresses’ career momentum has been hardly due simply to Allen’s power. In fact, I have noted for some time that famous actors like Alan Alda, Alec Baldwin, Martin Landau, and many others have turned up in Allen’s films in the past 25 or so years almost the way stars, or even you or I, might make a stop at a famous restaurant in New York City—Elaine’s and the Russian Tea Room (the former has closed). These actors (with the accord of casting agents) could say, “Hey, I’m going to be in New York for a weekend, I want to do something different. My agent said I could stop by Woody Allen’s production facility and do a part in his latest work-in-progress.”
See, we can make jokes about Allen and still love him. He’s become a well-known fixture in New York like the Empire State Building or the Brooklyn Bridge. Someday a new-generation Woody Allen could dig up, as a standard-bearing tchotchke of the past, not an old radio show routine or Louie Armstrong music from an old record shop or memories of a family growing up on Coney Island in the 1940s, but something directly reflective of the original Woody Allen’s own work.
A personal “crossing paths”—nothing much
One last little tidbit: I actually saw him in person, briefly, in 1995. I was going to be interviewed—you can believe this or not—for a simple copy editing job by an editor at Cosmopolitan magazine (yes, young men did work there as lower-level editors); the whole situation seems so unlikely in general, and atypical of my career route, that it almost seems like it was a dream and not real life. I was waiting in a waiting area, with a view of a hall; and moments before, when I had come up from the lobby, I overheard someone speak as if Woody Allen was in the building, but I didn’t think much more of it; I thought it was an offhand joke.
As I was in the waiting area, Allen appeared down the hall, talking to Helen Gurley Brown, who indeed looked like someone elderly trying to look 40 years younger. Allen looked just the way he always has—you know how he looks; but paler. He was speaking in a sort of appealing, not-quite-groveling way to Brown, as if rounding out some presentation of some sort; I think he had a new movie to promote at the time. The next issue of Cosmo had a little editorial section with a picture of Allen, and noted how he’d met with Brown. This was in the wake of the Soon-Yi Previn/Dylan Farrow issue (by a couple years), and maybe he had to work harder than usual in 1995 to do footwork-borne promo for his latest film.
I didn’t get the job there I interviewed for—probably just as well for both me and Cosmo.
Stardust Memories as a sort of crossroads work
Stardust Memories is interesting on a number of counts. For one thing, review compendiums don’t give it super-high marks; Leonard Maltin gives it three stars, and notes how audiences didn’t entirely warm to what seemed its narcissistic thematic bent. Today, people maybe wouldn’t remember it as one of their favorite Allen works. Yet Allen himself has called it (not in so many words) one of his three best films—I believe what his comment actually was, from some filmed or otherwise published profile done of him (can’t supply the reference right now), is that it was one of his three films that came out the most as he originally envisioned them. The other two, he said, are The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985; I recall having seen this in the theater, and I think it was poignant, but I can’t quite remember what it was about [update 3/17/14: I saw it in 2014; will say more in the future]) and Match Point, which works surprisingly well considering Allen was in his early seventies when he made it, and is atypical of him for not at all being a comedy.
If I were to guess, I would think that at least one major part of the reason he favors Stardust Memories and Match Point—which have very little overlap in style or content—is for their treatment of his serious themes, especially luck as determining life, death, guilt: all the existential themes that also add a unique element to his work. That is, he is a comic with a flair for dramatization who is trying to appeal broadly with belly laughs but who treads into philosophic territories that deal with despair, the prospect of death, and so on, making him a child of the more serious strains of Cold War culture, and something of a fossil today (for younger viewers).
Stardust came more or less in the middle of his “crest period” of 1977-86, and not insignificantly it is the one film from this period that did not feature either of his two historically primary leading ladies and muses: Keaton and Farrow. In a way, I look at it as a sort of transitional work that was made in absence of a certain set of conditions that helped shape his good work, but which still is as good as it is because his creative juices were still flowing because he was still in his crest period, and also was helped by the critical attention with which he was lavished.
One odd thing about it—and I’ll return to the plot aspect of this—is that it features not one but three leading ladies: one is Charlotte Rampling, an interesting, European-inflected actress (she’s English, but doesn’t seem typically this way) who would appear in later, non-Allen works like the horror film Swimming Pool (2003) and the very recent The Eye of the Storm (2011). In these later films she seems “past her salad years,” an older woman, a grande dame of sorts, but in the 1980 Stardust she is obviously younger, but seems to have an actress’s command of her performance that makes her seem older than her years—her part is actually of a manic-depressive, and she gives clearly the strongest performance of the three lead actresses in Stardust. The other two female stars include Marie-Christine Berrault, a charming French actress who adds some European flavor that is more obvious than Rampling’s—her part is of someone Allen’s character has known, with whom he has a sort of fling (she is separated from her husband); I don’t think Allen ever worked with Berrault as an actress again. Rounding out the set is Jessica Harper, a clear American who plays something of a hippie, though a well-groomed one, who is also a violinst; Allen’s character also has a dalliance of sorts with her. Stardust seems like a setting for an audition for who will be Allen’s next regular leading lady. Of course, none of them end up with this status; Farrow takes this role starting in 1982, with Allen’s next film.
His dealing with critical and audience reactions to his turn to the serious
Stardust, in a sense, reveals a lot of Allen’s thematic agendas, sometimes in a none-too-subtle way, while it is also a grab-bag of incidents, little vignettes, jokes, opinions…. It seems to take the best aspects of Annie Hall and Manhattan—ideas involving adult views on life and society and romance—and lays them out almost like an amazing variety of do-dads reflecting one’s life, the way a ton of contents from a suitcase could be arrayed on a bed when one is traveling. If the three leading ladies I mentioned suggested structural clutter, that is emblematic of the film. If you understand the main structure of the film, and if you watch it more than once, you can appreciate it as a dense array of ideas and images that, if you forgive it, works surprisingly well and is also a time capsule of the time in which it was made.
I remember a roommate I lived with in 1983 talking about Woody Allen films and his confidently opining that he liked the older, straight-comic ones; he didn’t like when Allen got more serious, which he seemed to regard as, I supposed, pretentious. It is a key feature of this film that its central character, played by Allen, grapples with the critical notion that comes at him from more than one source, and I paraphrase, “We liked your older, funnier films better.” It is in view of this sort of line that many regarded Stardust as being about himself, though he has maintained it should not be read this way. It is true that a writer, whether of films or not, if he writes on a character that seems a lot like himself, could be considered to be flatly autobiographical with this, which usually (with any writer) is an unfair reading. In Allen’s case, because filmmakers tend not to be as subtly rich as, say, novelists, where similarity to the author tends to be overlooked more (or not made an issue of), the similarity between director Sandy Bates and Allen is hard to get past when you first see this film, not least because sometimes the flashy visual style can go to the length of using a large picture of Allen himself, which almost seems (on the surface) like self-hagiography. But if you take Allen at what he meant to be doing here, writing about a character that is not meant to be himself, and if you grapple with the complexity of the film, then you can appreciate what it is doing, and enjoy the humor, which pops up often with a lot of ticklers.
Sandy Bates is a director whose films have taken a turn to the serious; in fact, in this film’s semi–stream-of-consciousness style, early on we see a film-within-a-film, and then studio honchos, including a female played by Saturday Night Live alumna Laraine Newman, react to it with withering criticism, seeming to echo what some viewers of Allen might have said—he’s gotten self-serious, he’s gotten morbid, etc. A subplot then is that the studio heads want to tack a different ending onto Bates’ film, to make it more commercial.
At the same time, Bates goes to attend a festival at a beachside hotel to honor his films—and allow the audience to question him, as in a presentation at a college campus. This seems to happen at a palatial facility called the Hotel Stardust (hence part of the film’s title), though its location turns out to be near the seashore, so maybe the location is supposed to be on Long Island, which conforms with the prevalence of New Yorker types in the film-loving audience. Along with this, Bates has interactions with his live-in girlfriend Dorie, played by Rampling, who is a manic-depressive and, as the film notes one-liner-style in a couple places, is a lot of fun two days of the month but is a basket case the rest of the time. Bates casts her in some of their films, and on set she can be fun or be a bitter terror. Rampling, not a striking beauty, brings a precision and passion to her role that seem to put her in a league with other female anger-wielders like Debra Winger. Her prominent cheekbones and somewhat widely-spaced but warmly insinuating eyes give her a sort of exotic, catlike appearance. She is an interesting actress who is rewarding to see even in the more recent films I’ve mentioned.
When at the festival, with casual walking around as this peripatetic, ambling film portrays, Bates encounters Isabel [sp?], played by Berrault, who is charming (he knows her from before) and whom Bates starts to serenade in his Woody Allen way. (I found from another viewing that he has phoned her after he has first gotten to his hotel room; later, after meeting up with her, he finds she has left her husband, apparently because of her previous affair with Bates.) *(I should add that on the umpteenth viewing, it is pretty clear that all the Dorie scenes are memories, not "current action" scenes, though in the film's fantasy-incorporating way, it seems as if the Dorie business is present-day, which in an emotional sense I think Allen wanted to convey anyway. So in a sense, he has a "memory relationship" going on with Dorie while he also has those real ones going on with Isabel and the violinst.)* Bates seems almost a serial dater, or an oaf who can’t help but mess up his life with dalliances with multiple women. This will happen to blow up in his face later in the film when Isabel raises indignation over his emotional allegiance to Dorie. Bates also encounters a film fan played by Jessica Harper, whom he ends up consorting with a bit (though she has arrived at the festival with a date or boyfriend). Add to Bates’ rather manic skirt-chasing a tiny subplot where Dorie berates him for his apparent (perhaps illusory) flirting with Dorie’s kid cousin, and you have a picture of a guy who is wildly at loose ends in the female-companionship department. [Update 3/17/14: It's notable that in Bates' discussion with Dorie of the kid-cousin issue, Dorie reveals she knows about that sort of thing because she used to exchange playful/pre-sexual (?) looks with her father, which puts the whole matter, in the film's terms, in an area of absurdity.]
More generally, this film is about a filmmaker who is undergoing a midlife crisis; Allen was about 45 at the time. The film 10, directed by Blake Edwards and released the same year, tackles something of the same theme (without being as floridly stylized as Allen’s film is); it starred Dudley Moore and a newcomer, Bo Derek (real name, Mary Cathleen Collins), but is more remembered as the debut of Derek, who has long been considered as strikingly beautiful as she is lacking in acting talent (I understand she has been a champion of horses in more recent years, as well as advocating for wounded veterans).
In its romantic aspect—the challenge of a relationship with a female—Stardust is well within the range of Allen’s films, many of which have dealt in one way or another with this theme; also here are brief, plunked-down meditations on meaning in life, guilt, anger, etc. The theme of luck as a determinant in life would turn up—maybe seeming portentous and undigested to unsympathetic critics, and just as a trademark theme to others—in films as late as Match Point. Allen is unique in combining appealing comedy with philosophical asides, in a way that seemed germane to Cold War concerns among the thinking middle class, where the question of Death from Above (a nuclear attack) was still a realistic worry, and the memories of the grim killing fields of World War II and Spartan conditions at home (Depression era deprivations, wartime rationing) left lingering, sobering imprints on older audience members’ minds.
This film came at a time when European-style philosophy still seemed in our infrastructure
I of course was, compared to the World War II–era men when they were off to war, a spoiled young Turk in the late 1970s; I turned to philosophy in good part because of the role the Soviet Union played in the world, a country that arched over world affairs in part because of the mysterious thing called ideology, a bastard form of philosophy—it was the S.U. that was the reason why we had to fear nuclear attack, why we young males had to sign up for the Selective Service in 1980 again after President Carter reinstated it, etc. Also, that was the decade that former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who had been exiled by that point, died in 1971 (he had been removed from office in 1964). I remember a 1971 issue of Life magazine or some such, wording things in the glib way New York media have traditionally done, saying Khrushchev now had his “second death.” My father had just died in 1970, and I thought I understood death; what the heck did “second death” mean? My mother explained, boiling things down for my kiddish understanding and per her own somewhat limited understanding at the time: Khrushchev had been exiled, she said, and the Russians considered that a form of death, and then he really died, so that was his “second death.” I thought this was so weird, I who was about 10. How could a country be so perverse as to use a word like death that way, was more or less what I thought. In some sense, that started me on a groping will-to-understanding, more developed later, that philosophy could potentially be used as a skeleton—when it was in the form of dogmatic ideology—to help shape the world in hitherto unknown, and sometimes grotesque, ways. By late in high school, I had to understand what philosophy was, or what it should be. That was part of my intellectual development.
I first saw Stardust in the theater in 1980, when I was in college. I was rather puzzled by it; I didn’t think it was as good as Manhattan, or Annie Hall, the latter of which I might have seen on TV or in a movie-series screening at college. But more generally, I appreciated Allen’s importing philosophic themes into his films. It seemed like an adult, relevant thing to do, for those who were inclined to be more serious. Today, when I view Stardust with older eyes, and having seen it several times, I feel it is a time capsule: not only do its allusions to philosophic issues (even brief name-dropping as of Schopenhauer) seem quaint, or of an older time, but on the other hand, this film also makes me nostalgic in a way for when popular art often was, in essence, more than empty entertainment. This film shows Allen firing on his intellectual cylinders as well as on others, as did other cultural leaders of the time.
The novelist Joseph Heller (died 1999), whose belly-laugh humor seems the most similar to Allen’s of any recent novelist (or vice versa), faced a different challenge than Allen: I am not sure whether to call it the reverse, obverse, or inverse of Allen’s challenge—but Allen worked in a pop-art form, and used sharp humor to cover a range of topics, as well as imported philosophic thoughts that risked his being seen as pretentious. Heller, for his part, worked in the more serious realm of literary fiction, but (though he said in 1984 this was for artistic reasons) he imported popular-style humor in most of his novels, certainly after his more sober second novel Something Happened. The popular-humor styling or modality was, one would presume, especially “a desired criterion” when the enormous sales of Catch-22 made it “wise” in terms of marketing (his streamlined 1979 novel Good as Gold, his arguably last truly good novel, seems to bear this out); but of course, this style put him at risk of seeming to pander too much to a middlebrow audience for the types of themes he covered when more serious. (This very roughly sums Heller; I happen to know his work very well, and know better than to leave an account of his humor at this; I am just including a glib summary in the midst of analyzing Allen.)
Both artists dealt, somewhat self-consciously, with issues of death, survival, suffering, etc. And both were influenced, one way or another, by the Marx Brothers, whose zany humor still appeals today and who in the 1930s probably seemed superficially just about fun, but whose targets were still for serious minds: war, the pretensions of high society, etc. In a sense, they sneaked by a lot of satire by making it zany enough that not everyone saw what it was up to at first.
In a way, Allen is like a college student who puts big posters of his hero on his walls for all who know him to see (at least, this is the sort of impression you get from this film). In Stardust, in a typically stylized shot, we see a wall decoration depicting Groucho Marx with one of his leading ladies; the Marx Brothers are otherwise alluded to in this film and other efforts by Allen; one of his late films, Everyone Says I Love You (1996), which I haven’t seen, is titled after a song in one of the Marx Brothers’ classic films.
The visual and social-satire style
I wrote numerous notes on this film recently; I won’t try to write everything I could that is worth remarking; this film really should be seen to be appreciated. If you understand the plot framework I described, then you can watch it with understanding, because not only does it have a way of shifting between scenes that seems a little arbitrary if not stream-of-consciousness (somewhat like the simpler Annie Hall). Here, there are also inserted little scenes that reflect memories (entertained by Bates “in the present moment”) of Sandy Bates’ youth—the red-haired boy with glasses doing magic tricks is Bates as a boy (Allen also did magic tricks as a boy). Bates’ parents turn up in several scenes in the film; the mother is especially bold in, for instance, revealing in 1970s-style humor that not only did Sandy
By the way, other “memories” or “imaginations” (had by Bates as he is at the film festival) that suddenly are posited within the “current goings-on” include Bates’ recollecting Dorie, in a sudden image with her posed lonely-looking against a dwarfing background. This sort of visual method, which is used a few times in the film, apparently is an allusion to the techniques of Michelangelo Antonioni, who was noted for visually suggesting alienation in his work of the 1960s and ’70s.
The film is noted as paying tribute to Federico Fellini, for its flashy way of depicting faces big, in all their homely or odd glory, as Fellini did; in fact, this Fellinieqsue aspect also is cited in critical notes on the Coen brothers, in their use of rather grotesque, close-up shots of faces. Stardust, in fact, seems like a Coen brothers film for both its visual style and its densely arrayed humor; its visual style also echoes Orson Welles—another hero verbally alluded to in the film—in his Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil phases, where you have to look sharp to catch a wealth of details within one shot, which when juxtaposed can be pretty funny. The cinematographer was Gordon Willis, who collaborated with Allen starting with Annie Hall and all the way to The Purple Rose of Cairo. If you don’t like black-and-white photography, that’s another thing that may turn you off this film, but I think the B&W photography here is handled quite well. Willis’ specialty was shooting with lower light than more traditional cinematographers used, so his shots have a sort of warmly colored, sometimes dim look; this is especially notable in the Godfather films by Francis Ford Coppola, which Willis also worked on.
Generally, when filmmakers work with black-and-white photography, texture of darks and lights becomes important, which Stardust has a field day with. The film’s second big theme—in addition to relationships—comprises the problems posed by adulation by the public, which perhaps is what shapes most of this film’s little incidents and which most turns off those viewers who see it as narcissistic. This theme, per Allen, is best treated by the way the photography handles the multitude of people Bates deals with: agents, promo people, film executives among the “insiders,” and all wealth of outsiders like star-struck fans wanting a simple autograph, and the assortment of characters and crazies wanting something from Bates, whether those from NYC wanting him to be involved in some fundraiser or such or those fans who turn up in his bed, homely and earnest of face, with a gift of brownies and hash on the side in a separate wrapping, not baked in, because the fan didn’t know how “much [he] took.” There are so much of these tidbits of all sorts of people flowing through Bates’ life that you have to listen hard for some of the lines—one man outdoors seeking an autograph volunteers, “I was a caesarian.”
Final notes on social pretensions, one-liners, etc.
Among some of the costumes and makeup—despite my memories of the good, bad, and ugly of the late 1970s and early 1980s—I actually don’t always know what is exaggerated in this film for crazy effect, or what was really fashion. We know that fashion among the middle class, not least among the more well-to-do in the New York
Bit players—or former partners—of Allen’s turn up in numerous places. A heavy-accented sort who crosses paths with Bates a couple times—a former childhood friend or classmate, it turns out—is performed by the actor who played one of the two ignoramuses outside the theater in Annie Hall (whom Allen’s character Alvie Singer “slurs” as Teamsters at one point). At another point, a man who approaches Bates when Bates is unseen in a phone booth, and asks for Allen to be part of an NYC fundraiser or such, is (I think) played by the short actor who, in Annie Hall, played an auditioning comic whom Allen watches with barely disguised discomfort.
Louise Lasser, a pre-Diane Keaton partner from early in Allen’s movie career, appears in a couple scenes as Bates’ booking agent or such. Jeff Goldblum, who would later have notable film roles, appears a couple times, more conspicuously toward the end, among the group of grandstanding people in a field spewing forth various one-liners and thematic formulations; he had had a tiny part in Annie Hall, at the party at the house of the musician played by Paul Simon.
Among newcomers within the Allen orbit was a young Daniel Stern, who appears a couple times, long-haired and lightly bearded, as a callow aspiring actor.
There are numerous quotable one-liners. One from Allen/Bates, in a beachside meeting with film executives: “To you I’m an atheist. To God I’m the loyal opposition.” (For those who are interested in philosophy, if you’ve heard of Saint Anselm’s proof of the existence of God, and if you know philosopher Bertrand Russell’s “theory of descriptions,” you can imagine Russell trying to analyze the meaning of that one-liner if it was taken perfectly seriously; his brain might blow a fuse—he would “plotz.”)
Relatively late in the film, a woman: “If you’re alienated, can you still have children?”
